Artists at Work: Joan Jonas

Amy Budd

Since the 1960s, Joan Jonas has pioneered the use of
performance in film and video through a physical engagement
with commonplace materials, bodily gestures and technologies.
Having initially studied sculpture before ‘stepping into the
space of performance’, Jonas intuitively manipulates
rudimentary materials, from paper cones to mirrors, masks,
folding fans and blackboards, thus amplifying their symbolic
potential. It is a visual vocabulary born out of an almost
‘surrealist proclivity for startling
juxtapositions’,1which Jonas compares to transformative modes of literature,
explaining, ‘I think of the work in terms of imagist poetry;
disparate elements juxtaposed… alchemy.’

This deeply personal visual language is in constant
transformation, as is her ever-evolving and self-reflexive
practice. Individual works – whether originally created in
video, performance or installation – exist in transit, they are
mutable entities translated and restaged into other mediums in
later life. As such, Jonas’s practice produces a uniquely
circular trajectory, acquiring an uncanny ouroboros quality by
simultaneously expanding and folding back on itself over
time.

In March this year Jonas was at Tate Modern in London to
stage Draw Without Looking (2013) her first online
performance. In the conversation below, Amy Budd speaks to
Jonas about performing for an online audience, navigating her
vast personal archive and her enduring fascination with
literary canons.

AMY BUDD: Your performance at Tate was the first work you have
specifically made for an online audience. When devising the
work, how did you prepare for this particular medium, knowing
that the audience would be experiencing it through a computer
screen, rather than on monitors, or as an installation?

JOAN JONAS: I have always performed and made images for the
camera or a live audience. I began with the mirrors as props,
and then I saw the monitor reflecting what the camera sees as
an ongoing mirror. So I am used to working in relation to the
camera – I can be in my own loft, performing for the camera
while watching the monitor. So in that sense the structure was
similar, the big difference was that there was a live audience
out there behind the camera.

AB: Given that creating images is a primary focus of your work,
did this change when you envisaged the performance being
experienced through the intimate encounter a computer screen
creates? Existing only inside the space of an incredibly
contained, flat frame?

JJ: I have always thought of video as a flat medium, and so the
difference between the monitor and the computer screen is not
that big. For the Tate performance it was like I was creating a
miniature because almost everyone would be viewing it on the
small screen of a personal computer. I began by editing a
video, working with unused footage of crystals that I shot last
spring for my installation at dOCUMENTA(13), Reanimation
(In a Meadow) (2010–12),2 and
adding the re-edited soundtrack that I had made with Jason
Moran for a performance version presented after the
installation was finished. I made a space with this video, a
projected space, which I then stepped into. To me it looked
like a room. I always consider the space I am performing in.
For instance, for the video Glass Puzzle (1973), I
imagined the monitor as a box that I could climb into,
constructing a stage set with paper especially for that framed
space, which the performers moved into and out of. At the Tate,
the video projection created an illusion of space that I
performed in for the camera. I thought of the viewers peering
into it.

AB: Your moving body appeared to activate the space, reaching
and, in turn, revealing the corners of the room, which weren’t
immediately obvious.

JJ: Yes, it was a new kind of space for me. While performing I
watched myself on a monitor, in order to guide myself. I
thought it was good to make direct contact, which is why I
began the piece that way, speaking to the audience.

AB: Dressed in white, your body was almost entirely camouflaged
by the materials of the projection. I wonder how you intended
your body to be read in that visually oblique situation? Given
your interest in Noh theatre, it also seemed reminiscent of
Japanese Bunraku puppetry, where the puppeteers are dressed in
black, so the audience focuses on the actions of the puppets,
but not the performer.

JJ: The Bunraku is amazing theatre, but I wore white in order
to interact with the projection, disappear and reappear. If I
had worn black, you’d see the figure because the projected
image would be absorbed by the black. I was interested in how
the projection appeared on my body and the way I appeared in
the work. I still have to absorb this and explore it further.
Usually in my video performances the video sequences or
backdrops rely on my timing: they follow me. In this case the
video played and I responded, so there was a different dynamic.
I wanted to be integral to the texture, to both blend in and
stand out at different times. It interested me to be in the
projection of the crystals.

AB: Do the crystals operate in the same way as mirrors in your
work, as ritual objects?

JJ: In a way, yes. They fragment the space and reflect it. They
are also transparent, you can see through them, or you think
you can see through them sometimes. I like that illusion.

AB: In your inaugural lecture as Visiting Professor at the
Royal College of Art, London earlier this year [5 March 2013],
you spoke of your ongoing fascination with mirrors,
particularly ‘how the mirror as a medium alters the space’. How
does the mirror operate as medium in your work, rather than
another prop or object?

JJ: It is another tool. From the very beginning I was
interested in how I could alter the image. Of course it was a
prop, but then it became a medium through the way I used it. In
Mirror Pieces (1968–71), for example, there wasn’t
just one mirror – there were seventeen mirrors held by
seventeen performers. As the performers slowly moved the
mirrors, the mirrors altered the space and the image of the
space. The audience saw themselves, each other, and the
performers in the mirrors. When I began to work with video I
saw it as an ongoing mirror. I worked with a closed circuit
system of a video camera and monitor in relation to the live
subject, to explore the way the subject would be altered as it
passed through this system. The medium transformed the
experience of the actual live subject through the mediated
video image. The mediated image transforms what we think of
reality.

I immerse myself in these various mediums. At the same time as
I began to work in video, I was experimenting in performance
with distance and landscape. In works such as Jones Beach
Piece (1970) and Delay Delay (1972), distance
became a medium that altered the audience’s perception of
movement, object and sound ­– the audience was situated a
quarter of a mile away from the performance.3 The film Song Delay (1973) is
based on these performances. The crystals in Reanimation
(In a Meadow) also create a kind of medium.

AB: It’s interesting that you mentioned Glass Puzzle
before as this was made in the isolation of your studio,
whereas Draw Without Looking was produced in a larger
and more public space – the gallery. Did you have Glass
Puzzle in mind as you were planning this new work?

JJ: Glass Puzzle was a video I made in my loft. We
constructed spaces with black and white paper, but actually
almost my entire loft was the set. There were two performers
[Jonas and Lois Lane] and all the moves were in relation to the
real space or the space of the monitor, and related to the
poses of women in photographs taken by the photographer E. J.
Bellocq who photographed prostitutes in New Orleans at the turn
of the last century. Usually I shoot my own works, but in this
case the cameraperson, Babette Mangolte, was really a
collaborator. The gallery in which I performed Draw Without
Looking was actually a smaller space than that loft. I
often think of the set for Glass Puzzle as a kind of
template.

AB: Could you say more about producing work to be viewed
online? When I watched the live-stream performance, at times
the image became quite pixelated, probably because my broadband
wasn’t fast enough. I wonder how you respond to this, when the
transmission affects the quality of the images you’re so
carefully creating?

JJ: You know, for me it is the only drawback of working in this
medium. If you work with video and put it out in the world, you
don’t have control over how people are looking at it. Even in a
museum there may be the wrong kind of projection, or maybe an
old projector whose bulb is burning out or the colour is wrong.
I looked at the recording of the performance on my iPhone and
that was horrifying, in a way. But I am willing to let it go,
you have to let go. People’s experiences will simply be
different in different situations.

AB: As Draw Without Looking demonstrated, you’re
continually recycling props or restaging gestures in your
videos and performances. And so by returning to past works,
materials and ideas you create a vocabulary that is constantly
renewing and reflecting itself. I wonder how you navigate your
archive. How do you choose what to re-present and re-perform?

In the sixties, there was
a reaction against literary sources but I wanted to develop my
own particular aesthetic. Borges was an early inspiration –
reading his short stories, I was interested in the way he wrote
about mirrors.JJ: It is based on how I feel about a
past work. One of the works that I have revisited is
Mirage (1976), partly because the material has an
abstraction that can be reconfigured. It began as a video
performance in 1976, which used just 5 minutes of a 30-minute
film made by myself and shot by Babette Mangolte. I then edited
this entire film together with another sequence of footage shot
at the same time and it became another work, which was included
in the various installation versions of Mirage in the
1990s. Finally when the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought
the installation, I decided to leave it. For my most recent
work, Reanimation(In a Meadow) (2010-12), I
used footage from a video made in a swimming pool called
Disturbances (1973). Reanimation, is partly
about glaciers that are now melting and the image of the
surface of the pool with people swimming in it seemed perfectly
appropriate. Likewise characters reappear; I used the figure of
Melancholia in various works, such as The Shape, The Scent,
The Feel of Things (2005–06) and in Reanimation,
because of its multiple implications.

AB: Your work also draws on a wide range of literary
references, taking on canonical figures from Dante to Borges,
or the modernist poetry of Yeats, Pound and H.D. [Hilda
Doolittle], using literature to find your voice. What has
attracted you to these particular writers and texts?

JJ: In the sixties, there was a reaction against literary
sources but I wanted to develop my own particular aesthetic.
Borges was an early inspiration – reading his short stories, I
was interested in the way he wrote about mirrors. Literature
has always been a source for my work, but while I write and
edit fragmented texts, I don’t consider myself a writer but a
visual artist.

AB: Is there a danger of suggesting a hierarchy between
performance and video, through your translation of one into the
other? Ultimately video has a certain amount of longevity that
undocumented performance doesn’t.

JJ: No I do not see a hierarchy. I constantly go back and forth
between performance and video. For instance, if I work on a
performance and it becomes an installation, I re-edit the video
and find other ways to deal with the material. Then, when I
repeat the performance, I might reintegrate this new edit into
the performance. From the very beginning I was interested in
making films and videos and in translating the live work into
these mediums that become autonomous works themselves. However,
these new edits are also altered as they are integrated into
the live work. For instance, as I re-install or re-perform
Reanimation I might very well integrate the material
I’ve developed for the Tate.

AB: It’s an incredibly fluid, self-reflexive way to work
insofar as you are not creating individual works as such, but
rather a whole vocabulary that is produced and refined over
time.

JJ: That’s right, I always thought of my work as being a kind
of language. So over the years, I have always thought of
building up a language of my own, a visual language.

AB: How would you characterise this?

JJ: Well, it is hard to say. It is the way I thought of the
structure of poetry, the way that early imagist poets such as,
Pound, H.D. and William Carlos Williams put images together to
make another image, and also of the structure of the Japanese
Haiku. I have always worked that way.

AB: Your work at times acquires a strange ahistorical quality,
perhaps due to the way you combine new technologies with
archaic references to other cultures. When watching
Wind (1968), your first video work, I couldn’t place
it. It felt reminiscent of early modernist film.

JJ: I was very influenced by early Russian, German and French
film-makers. I have always been interested in how rituals began
in different cultures. The Noh theatre started as a ritual and
I wanted to think about the rituals of my own context, what it
meant to be making performances for my friends in these
downtown spaces in the sixties. In the past I have quoted some
of the rituals of other cultures in my work, for instance
drawing in the sand.

AB: And these rituals enable a practice that both produces and
destroys images and materials ­­– you wipe away your blackboard
drawings, and also crumple up the paper in Reading
Dante. You are not precious with the materials and rituals
you draw from.

JJ: No, the material is meant to be manipulated and changed to
create certain effects, to draw on. Paper is very sculptural,
perhaps more stable than video. In performing a drawing, it is
not about making a precious object, it is about the action and
the image. It gives me pleasure to crumple the paper, to create
another fleeting moment like the performance itself.

Footnotes

Susan Morgan, Joan Jonas: I Want to Live in the Country (And
Other Romances), London: Afterall Books, 2006. p.
20. ↑

Based on the novel Under the Glacier by Halldór
Laxness, with Jonas utilising glass, crystals and diffracted light
to symbolise ice, Reanimation (In a Meadow) (2010–12) was
installed in a remodeled pre-fab house in Karlsaue Park, Kassel
during dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012. Later versions such as Jonas’s recent
installation at Yvon Lambert in Paris were titled simply
Reanimation (2010–12).↑

Jones Beach Piece is one of Jonas’s early Outdoor
Performances (1970–90), originally staged on Jones Beach, Long
Island. Here, Jonas played with de-synchronisation, performing for
a viewing audience situated a quarter of a mile away. Jonas
continued to manipulate these delays in her subsequent performance,
Delay Delay (1972) and film, Song Delay
(1973). ↑

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